Jury out on green jobs, DOE loans

The Energy Department’s clean-energy loan program hasn’t yet yielded the kind of moonshot-style success that President Barack Obama envisions would transform the U.S. economy. But its results also go well beyond the $535 million collapse of Solyndra.

With help from the $16 billion loan guarantee program, solar farms are spreading across the California and Arizona deserts, wind turbines are producing electricity in Oregon, and workers in southwestern Kansas are building a factory to convert inedible plant parts into ethanol. Some of the 26 projects aided by the program are even creating jobs — as many as 4,000 all told, according to partial figures provided by several of the companies that received the guarantees.

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But other companies have stumbled into bankruptcy court, layoffs or the baleful glare of GOP-led House investigations.

The best-known example is Solyndra, which laid off 1,100 workers when it went under in September. But the program has also witnessed the bankruptcy filing of energy storage company Beacon Power, layoffs and furloughs totaling hundreds of workers by at least four companies and a $520 million loss by loan guarantee recipient SunPower. Republicans have also raised questions about how real estate company Prologis obtained a $1.4 billion partial guarantee for a nationwide rooftop solar installation effort.

It’s too early to tell whether most of the projects are successes or failures. DOE finalized 11 of the loan guarantees just last September as it was hurrying to sign off on billions of dollars before the program expired, so many of the efforts are in their early stages.

Still, a review of the projects by POLITICO reveals some patterns.

For one thing, the projects’ woes don’t appear to be evenly distributed. They’ve largely been concentrated in the solar manufacturing industry that has been battered by competition with cheap panels from China.

And the ultimate job gains from the program, while real, are unlikely to match the boom in temporary jobs that constructing the projects creates. For example, Sempra Generation’s Mesquite Solar 1 generation facility outside Phoenix has supported about 350 temporary construction jobs but will sustain just 10 permanent jobs once the plant is finished, the company says.

Still, the incomplete, muddled picture deters neither supporters nor critics of the program from speaking out.

The Energy Department is trumpeting the successes of its various clean-energy loan, vehicle and grant programs, including in a presentation last week that says the efforts are “accelerating America’s transition to a clean energy future.” Obama still talks up clean energy on the campaign trail.

Late Friday, House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans countered with their own assessment, complaining that “the green jobs agenda is an unfolding failure.”

Mitt Romney, meanwhile, has joined congressional Republicans in trying to turn Solyndra, and by extension the entire DOE program, into a watchword for job losses, government waste and corruption. The House has even voted to kill the Section 1705 loan guarantee program that financed Solyndra — even though it already expired last fall.

The 1705 program was created under the 2009 stimulus law, which set up the loan guarantee program alongside an existing 1703 energy loan program that Congress established four years earlier. The comprehensive energy law of 2007 had also created a separate loan program for advanced vehicles.